Tag: Mind

Light Child, Lightly.

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The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.

– Jack Pransky, Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living

Notes:

  • Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  • Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
  • Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own. The machine is malfunctioning, and we’re trying to think our way out of it. In 1961, Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Our mission, it seems, has to do with the mind.

— Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality (Atria/One Signal Publishers, April 9, 2024)

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Life is soupy, mixed up, and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows… [KP: How would you start to answer this vast question of what it means to be human? Perhaps, how has that evolved how you might start to answer that question?] What it is to be human is such a small thing…in this universe, right? Just try to be nice, be kind babies, be kind. As Vonnegut wrote. That’s the only guide. Try to be good and try to do the least harm and be kind. That’s the only human bit. But what it means to be more-than-human, that’s something else. That’s the bigger question, I think, for me is what it means to transcend that narrow frequency of being human in this time here to perhaps partake of something far greater, something more-than-human. That is actually the more deep or meaningful connection to everything around us… Every time we train our most sophisticated tools upon the central questions of our existence – Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? – the answer comes back clearer: Everyone and Everywhere… —  James Bridle, excerpts from “The Intelligence Singing All Around Us,” an interview with Krista Tippett. Onbeing, March 2, 2023.
Notes: Portrait: Quantum

Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.

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1040 (not your tax return), 1040 consecutive (almost) days on this Cove Island morning walk. Like in a row. 

But for the wind and the light rain, it would be a pleasant, 35° F morning in March. Ah yes, but for the wind and the light rain…it feels like 26° F, and the hood is up to protect this morning’s erratic ruminations. Diane Ackerman: “the brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to…,” no, i can’t say the word, let’s just say whatever comes after the End.

My weather app flashes an alert for a Coastal Flood Warning. With heavy rains overnight, the park, and its paths, are splotched with puddles. My boots are caked with mud from yesterday’s adventures, and rather than step around the puddles, I step through the center of them hoping the water line falls short of my boot tops. There is something ever so soothing about the clop clop clop — and racing barefoot through puddles during rainy summer days in August as an adolescent. The body light, floats like a feather, B.A., Before Adulthood, and the accumulation of the Heavy. My body veers towards one puddle and then the next, clop, clop, clop.  “Give me quickly / the cool water flowing from the Lake of Memory” inscribed on a fourth-century-B.C. Greek tablet.

I walk. Continue reading “Walking. In cool water from Lake of Memory.” →

Sleep, Harris. Rest from Yourself.

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Rest…

leave behind fear, hope, anger, spilled milk.

Take silence only.

Sky, wind. Sunrise after the rain.

Forget the rest.

Sleep, Harris.

Rest from yourself.

— Reverend West (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Raymond & Ray (Apple TV+, 2022)